bigtiny sez....

I come from a family with wide traditions of worship. Snake handling pentacostals, speaking in tongues; atheists; baptists, etc. My father never had much use for religion, but did convert to Catholicism to marry his third wife, who came from a VERY Catholic family...that was long after this tale though. My mother had me baptized in the Episcopal church when I was a baby and she drug me from time to time to services, which I hated. I was fascinated as a kid by all of this stuff....the Fire and Brimstone rantings of the 'Brothers' at my grandparents' church, to the reasoned 'talks' we'd get at the Episcopal church. I never understood what any of them were talking about though...and I certainly didn't believe that anything I did in life was going to get me thrust into a sulfurous pit of fire for all eternity. Between my second and third grade year, my parents decided to move from Ypsi, Michigan to Charleston, SC. Other than my father preferring the south and ...

I live in New England where toll roads are quite common. I hate toll roads. I hate the very concept of a toll road. Why? Because toll roads are a cheap hustle foisted on people by local, state and national gov'ts, who ought to be more interested in serving the general public, not hustling them. Most toll roads start out with the idea that there's a location that would be really well served by a new road, or bridge, or other piece of infrastructure.  Trouble is, there's no money in the budget for it and no politician wants to propose a tax hike. So, a proposal is made for a toll road. A road will be built at location X, stretching to location Y. It will be of n number of lanes, blah blah blah. It is quite common, at this stage of development (proposal) for a statement along the lines of "the total costs for the road should be covered by collected tolls over a 20 year period". When's the last time you saw a toll road lose its toll? There are roads like the...

As I watch various food shows and read food blogs, and see reviews of local restaurants, I continually run across some bozo who is selling a 'cuban sandwich'. Except, they're NOT selling a cuban sandwich. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the cuban sandwich. The classic cuban sandwich was born in Tampa Florida during the 1880s and was consumed mostly by the cigar factory workers in the Ybor City section of town. It is a very specific thing which I will describe below. Before I do though, let me explain why I feel it necessary to do this. All my life I've been seeing cooks, institutions, writers and various other folk mislabeling all kinds of different concoctions as the cuban sandwich. I mean, even going to school in the Tampa Bay area, they would serve us bologna sandwiches on longbread for lunch and call it a cuban sandwich. When one cares about food, and when one experiences this kind of thing long enough, one feels the need to set the record straight. S...

The ships arrived at dawn and by 8:00 AM it was clear that wherever the aliens were from, they were far, far ahead of us technologically. They demanded not a world or national leader or statesman, not a poet laureate, but a common person to whom they would explain their demands. I had spent the night passed out at the laundromat after a party at Sullivan's. It was there that the UN Security Force found me and hustled me onto the alien shuttle. There were hordes of politicos, strategists, academics, etc. all babbling incessantly about what I should say and try to learn. I was just thinking of a cold Heineken and some sardines and crackers.  On the ship I was led to a smallish room with a huge dais sized couch thing and a smaller, humanform chair. I took the chair. Shortly our alien invader appeared. It was big. REALLY big, like elephant big. It's body would be best described as fish like. Its head was a sunken cavity in the large end of the fish body that had two e...